Peterson’s tone was dismissive but he still peered through the Fountain’s windows again, checking that Manning was still distracted by his lunch guests.

Knox shrugged.

‘It’s unlikely,’ he said. ‘But it’s not impossible, is it?’

Peterson paused before he answered. Knox wondered if Manning’s faithful servant was finally starting to have doubts about his master.

‘If Manning was behind all this, why would he have sent for you in the first place?’ Peterson asked. ‘He could have taken whatever he wanted from that flat and no one would have questioned him.’

‘I don’t know,’ Knox conceded. ‘But it’s a bit too much of a coincidence when the city’s about to become the world’s biggest intelligence powder keg.’

‘And we’re doing everything we can to make sure it doesn’t go off. Which includes not jumping to conclusions. For all we know half of these new calculations are gibberish, and they just stumbled onto something that looks like Pipistrelle by dumb luck.’

Or,’ Knox countered, ‘this is just a fragment of what they had, and the fuse has already been lit by someone.’

Peterson thought for another long moment. ‘Even if you’re right,’ he said, finally, ‘and the security of the conference is in question, and your conspiracy is real, you still have to follow proper procedures. Give what you’ve got to White for review and we’ll reassess the threat.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then you go home.’

Chapter 27

Chapter 27

Medev’s Tupolev Tu-104 jet came into land over Lake Onega a few minutes before one o’clock in the afternoon. He’d been lucky that none of the planes kept on standby for the KGB at Chkalovsky airbase north of Moscow had been requisitioned for other emergencies that morning. He’d left the Lubyanka at half past nine, and was in the air an hour later.

He was the only passenger on the plane, and for the last two hours he’d let his mind reach back into his own memories of Karelia.

He’d been to this corner of the Soviet Union once before. In the winter of 1937 he’d been stationed on the Solovetsky Islands, five hundred kilometres north of Petrozavodsk in the middle of the White Sea. The islands were home to the Solovki special prison camp, where the people who had been deemed the greatest threat to Stalin’s authority were sent during the Great Purge. The islands had originally been a single, vast Orthodox Christian monastery before they were taken over by the Party and turned into what would become the model for all the other gulags that would spring up across the country’s more remote areas.